Make money teaching on-line with your own courses

I was contacted by some people in Vancouver who were interested in attending my SLR video workshop. The problem was that I’m living in Taiwan now. As I was currently teaching English I decided that I had the mindset to create my own course on creating travel videos using video as the platform. I put in the many hours to put together an outline and film the course. I thought this would be time well spent as there wasn’t any in depth travel video courses. So let’s start with how you can make money teaching on-line!

Where to sell your video course not Youtube

I love Youtube, but I think it is not the correct platform to sell a video course. My top video “Night in Vancouver” currently has 30,000 views and I haven’t earned anything on it. Youtube surprisingly rejected my request for monetization. Even if I did monetize based on 4kdownload’s claim of $5-7 per 1,000 views it would be $210US. If I used another site’s claim of $264 per month for 70,000 views this works out to .003 per view. Ok that’s not bad. Perhaps I should look more into sorting that out. I could also leverage to the high viewership on this video to promote my course, which I do. The point is that Youtube is not the platform to sell a course. It is difficult and requires a bit of luck in my experience to get in 5 digit viewership.

I could sell it on the Internet, but then I would have to find an audience and the logistics of delivering the video to my students. A 4 minute video lecture was 422mb for a 4minute and 20 second video lecture. I could have delivered it through my website and deliver it through E-junkie the problem was that the customer would have to download it, which would take too long. I searched the Internet for the right solution and came across Udemy.com – an online teaching platform based in San Francisco.

my top youtube video Nightlife in Vancouver with 30,000 views has earned me any revenue

What is Udemy?

They are an on-line learning platform based in San Francisco California USA.

They are well established with over 4,000,000 students

They have 18,000 courses ranging teaching people how to “Use Dropbox” to “teaching photography”

They have an app for Iphone and Google Android.

If you multiply the course price and number of students you would think some people are killing it on Udemy

What I think of Udemy so far?

My first course on Udemy
It is free to become an instructor and was fairly straightforward to create a course outline and upload my video to their platform. Their website is user friendly and provides you the guidance you need to complete your course. They do a good job of packaging your course for the web. If you’re interested you can check out my course “The Art of Travel video” here.

Students can preview your course curriculum and promotional video and decide if they want to join and pay for your course. Once they join you can interact with your students using Udemy. If Udemy sell’s the course through their efforts they keep half of the revenue. Udemy has a great system for creating coupon discounts for your course. If you sell the course through your promotional efforts you keep 100% of the income minus 3% for credit card transactions.

After creating my first course I wanted to use my momentum to create my second course on how to make money creating travel videos. They have a good community through their facebook group. The members are other teachers and people that are a part of Udemy. It is useful to get feedback on your course their and ask others questions.

udemy facebook group has been helpfulIt wasn’t long before I got my second course on-line.

I’ve made some sales and once of the great things is that Udemy uses a non-exclusive model so you can sell the course elsewhere. The thing to be aware of is that if your course is free on Udemy you can’t sell it on another platform like Skillfeed.

My second course “make money with travel videos”

Another Platform to sell your course called Skillfeed

Skillfeed is another on-line teaching platform owned by the major stock footage firm Shutterstock. I am familiar with Shutterstock as I host and sell almost 2000 video clips on their site.

If you put in the time and effort to create in my opinion it is a no brainer to sign up for free and host your course on Skillfeed.

What is Skillfeed?

They are an on-line learning platform. I think based in New York as they are a Shutterstock company

They are not as established as Shuterstock with 437 instructors

They have 43,499 video tutorials. I think they don’t list the number of courses as it is still a low number.

What I think of Skillfeed so far?

make money with travel videos on skillfeed I had a few minor issues uploading my videos to Skillfeed, but once up their I went through their approval process rather quickly. Their model is different as they charge their their customers a monthly flat fee for unlimited access to courses. The way you earn revenue is by the number of minutes viewed for your courses. It was quite encourage to see the number of minutes go up day by day and currently check it daily.

I have the same two courses up there from Udemy. The great thing was that it didn’t take much more work to get the same two course up on Skillfeed. I think if you’re planning to teach a course and sell them that the best strategy would be to sell both on Udemy and Skillfeed. At the moment my Gopro course is performing much better on Skillfeed than it is on Udemy. Having your course on both platforms gives you access to a broader audience.

If you found this post useful and do decide to sign up for skillfeed I would appreciate you sign up here.

It is a referral link for me. After you sign up and create your courses you can also share your experience and ask other instructors to sign up if you believe in it.

Skillshare a 3rd teaching platform

As we speak I got contacted from someone last night on email. She said she was impressed with my photography and wanted to invite me to host my content on skillshare. Here is what I know about skillshare

I’m still learning more about this site, but it looks like there is a minimum requirement of 2 classes with 300+ students to qualify to get paid. I’m wondering how if this means your first 2 courses have to be free before you apply. If this is the case it is a deterrent to leveraging your existing courses on Udemy and Skillfeed. I will share more as I learn.

If you enjoyed this post and are interested in joining Skilfeed please join using this link. It will help me with a referral income and doesn’t cost you anything.

Sign up for my newsletter and I will share a PDF that covers the following:

What tools I used to create my video and screen captures

Tips on creating your course

How I created the cover’s for my course on my own

Lessons learned: what worked and what didn’t

My revenue for the past 2 months on these 2 platforms

Some of the tactics that I used on Udemy to earn reviews and get my first students

A good podcast from another resource that provides strategy and tactics on Udemy and Skillfeed